“The key to balancing our
responsibility judgments,” writes Adam Grant, “is to focus our attention on
what others have contributed.” Grant suggests a simple exercise for
acknowledging and addressing the Responsibility Bias in a group. “All you need
to do,” he continues, “is make a list of what your partner contributes before you estimate your own
contribution.”[1] Of
course, that works well in marriages, friendships and other relationships where
such information is readily available. This bias is a greater challenge in a
congregation—a system where people’s contributions are in principle protected
as privileged and confidential information.
So a healthy congregation will
find ways to assist people in making a general estimate of their relative
contributions to the life of the congregation. This is the value of publishing
in some fashion what people give to an organization. We don’t live in a time
when individual giving records are published annually. I suspect that we are
better off for not publishing such records, but sometimes I wonder. Instead, we
can certainly publish giving ranges with percentages or number of households in
each range. The purpose is not to make anyone feel ashamed. Instead, the
purpose is to allow people a realistic framework in which to view their
contributions in relationship to those of others.
A greater challenge in this
regard would be to measure and report how much people give in service to the
community and/or to the congregation. Since much serving is not in the public
eye, people will have a skewed view of who serves and how much. A few people
who do things that are visible to the community are often those seen as the
ones who “do it all.” Systems for gathering information on the community
service of members are important in giving a better context for assessing my
own level of service to congregation and community.
Addressing the Responsibility Bias
isn’t merely about getting people to give more. It’s about helping people to
live better. If we don’t provide such relative contribution information, we
will encourage people to be takers rather than givers. “In many domains of
life,” Adam Grant observes, “people end up taking because they don’t have
access to information about what others are doing.”[2]
On the other hand, many people—when provided with relative contribution
information—will do more to contribute “their fair share.”
Remember that the majority of
people are matchers. “People often take because they don’t realize they’re
deviating from the norm,” Grant concludes. “In these situations, showing them
the norm is often enough to motivate them to give—especially if they have matcher
instincts.”[3] They don’t wish to feel that they
are “indebted” to someone else, even if that debt is self-perceived.
Here's an example of the power of context information.
Robert Cialdini and Wesley
Schultz studied the impact of information on energy saving behavior among some
California and Arizona utility customers. Customers received messages about
energy conservation as part of their billing materials. Some customers received
minimal information about conservation benefits. Some customers received
information that appealed mainly to self-interest in the form of significant
cost savings. Some customers received information that emphasized the benefits
to the environment produced by conservation. And some customers received
information that allowed them to compare their behavior to that of their
neighbors.
The only information that
resulted in any reduction in energy usage was the message that produced
comparison with the neighbors. The information that created a context for
giving was the effective message. The information that equipped customers to
resist their Responsibility Bias produced a real change in behavior.
What I
find most interesting is the follow-up to this study. “Consistently across our
studies,” the authors wrote, “participants rate normative messages as the least
effective and believe that they are not influenced by their perceptions of
others.” So the customers didn’t think that the contextual information impacted
their behavior. “But,” the authors observed with scholarly understatement, “our
data show otherwise.”[4]
So even when people in our
congregations insist, as they often do, that they will not be impacted by
knowing (at least in general terms) what other people give, we should not
believe them. That is precisely what we should expect to hear. This is the
final expression of Availability Heuristic. I cannot bring to mind specific
instances of the giving behavior of others, especially when it comes to
financial giving. So those instances don’t really exist for me. Therefore they
do not impact me.
But our data will show otherwise.
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